OUR BEST FRIENDS

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An Albuquerque man who gave his dog’s name when he was approached during a voter registration drive at a Wal-Mart two years ago didn’t think “Tuckup Koepke” would actually become a registered voter.

But he did.

Don Pizzolato says he filled out the paperwork with his dog’s name, and a fake birth date and social security number — not expecting he would end up registered to vote in Bernalillo County. A week later though, his dog received a voter registration card in the mail.

Pizzolato’s decision to go public with the story — on the website Duke City Fix – was in response to an op-ed piece in the Sunday Albuquerque Journal in which the county clerk said voter fraud would be “extremely rare.”

“In Tuckup’s case either name, address, Social Security number or species should have raised some sort of flag. Apparently none of this was a problem for the wizards charged with keeping the integrity of the electoral process somewhere north of Richard Daley’s Chicago,” Pizzolato wrote.

“Anyone want to take a guess as to how successful I would be if I repeated the experiment ten times (different pet names, of course).”

Pizzolato said his dog — you can look up Tuckup’s registration (voter, that is) here — isn’t really going to vote.

The county clerk he was attempting to refute, Maggie Toulouse Oliver, was less than amused with it all, and contacted law enforcement authorities after seeing the website contribution. Registration fraud is a fourth-degree felony.

Jane Balogh, 67, a grandmother and Army veteran had registered her Australian shepherd-terrier mix as a voter to protest lax standards for voters to prove their identity and citizenship. She used a utility bill in the dog’s name â€” Duncan M. MacDonald â€” as identification.

A King County District Court judge dropped a misdemeanor charge of making a false or misleading statement to a public servant, based on Balogh’s completion of the terms of a plea agreement reached in September 2007.

She paid $240 in court costs and completed 10 hours of community service at the Tacoma Rescue Mission.

According to the Times, Balogh made no attempt to hide the deception, telling a number of elected officials what she had done and putting a pawprint instead of a signature on an absentee-ballot envelope.